AOL News Will Become Sphere.com

AOL rebranded its blog search engine Sphere as Surphace so it could free up the Sphere.com domain to become the main page for what's now known as AOL News, a company source tells us.

Our source says Sphere.come will "encompass all of AOL News."

AOL's plan to turn around the company is to become a next generation media company.

To that end, AOL EVP Bill Wilson has hired some 3,000 journalists and launched several supposed-to-be-huge news brands including PoliticsDaily.com and DailyFinance.com.

The problem with the plan is that so far, most of those sites depend on AOL.com traffic, which depends on people who use AOL to sign on to the Internet.

Here's how Sphere describes itself on its "About" page:

Welcome to this preview of Sphere, the next phase in the evolution of AOL News. Here you will find original reporting, analysis and commentary from our ever-growing cast of top-notch journalists. In the past few months, we've brought on writers and editors from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Time, The Atlantic and other great news organizations. And our network of contributors around the world is expanding each week. We had planned to wait until early next year to unveil Sphere, but the enthusiasm behind the project pushed us to reveal what we have so far. It's very much a work in progress. A more robust site is a few months away. Until then, we invite you to take a spin through our daily stories and to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks for checking us out. There is much more to come.